Einstein's Refrigerator: And Other Stories from the Flip Side of History

by Steve Silverman

  Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

  the strangest weapon of world war II

  You may find this very hard to believe, but the first intercontinental bombing mission was actually conceived and successfully targeted at the continental United States. Now take a trip back through your memory banks. Think about everything that you ever learned about World War 11. Are you able to place this series of attacks?

  Could it be Japanese kamikazes? No, they attacked American ships, never the continent. The Japanese had a similar kamikaze submarine program, called the Kaitan, that actually caused damage to the U.S. coast at the time, but this would never qualify as an intercontinental attack.

  Perhaps it was the Germans? No, they never touched us, either.

  Actually, what we’re talking about here is the Japanese FuGo program (just in case you missed the title at the top of the page). The Fu-Go plan was actually one of the most mysterious and unique military bombing assaults ever to occur.

  You see, the Japanese quickly realized during WWII that the American continent was just too far out of reach, so it remained unaffected by the ravages of the war. Their solution was to construct paper balloons that would cross the Pacific and bomb the United States.

  Now, 1 must admit that when 1 first heard about this story 1 was thrown off a bit. 1 have always associated Japan and balloons with origami. You know-those little folded paper balloons that you made in elementary school. 1 just could not conceive how anyone could create a tiny paper balloon and expect it to cross the mighty Pacific and harm the United States.

  Boy, was 1 wrong!

  These tiny paper balloons that 1 had imagined actually measured nearly thirty-three feet in diameter and were filled with hydrogen gas. Each balloon was crafted from tissue paper made from the Kozo bush, which is very similar to the American sumac, and consisted of over six hundred pieces of paper that were glued together with an adhesive known as Konnyaku-nori, manufactured from a type of Japanese potato. The balloons were waterproofed with, get this, fermented green persimmon juice!

  The making of these balloons was no small effort. In fact, it took nearly two years of testing and an investment of nearly 9 million yen (approximately 2 million prewar U.S. dollars) to get the program launched. The cost of each balloon was estimated to be slightly less than 10,000 yen (2,300 prewar dollars). Thousands of Japanese citizens participated in the manufacture of these balloons, although everyone was kept in the dark as to what was actually being made. Most of the labor force consisted of children who were released from school early so that they could devote their energies to the war effort.

  The balloons were designed to rise to a height between thirtytwo thousand and thirty-eight thousand feet and to stay aloft for some sixty-five to seventy hours. At this height, they would be carried by the jet stream (which was unknown to the rest of the world at the time) at a speed of 100 to 200 miles per hour to the United States.

  The design was actually quite ingenious. Each balloon carried five or six incendiary bombs and one conventional bomb. The balloons were equipped with up to thirty six-pound sandbags for ballast. These sandbags were released one at a time by an aneroid barometer trigger every time the balloon dipped below thirty thousand feet. Once the last sandbag was released, the designers figured that the balloon would be over the United States and an onboard battery lit a series of fuses to release the bombs. Finally, a demolition charge was set off to destroy any evidence of the balloon’s existence.

  A captured Fu-Go balloon that was inflated for U.S. Navy tests. (National Archives)

  Well, in theory that’s how it was supposed to work. Reality was another story.

  The first balloons were actually released in June 1944 and not a single one actually made it across the Pacific. Each balloon was fitted with a radio transmitter, which allowed the designers to track their paths.

  The Japanese were forced to go back to the drawing board. A new version of the balloon was completed in October 1944. The Japanese had actually planned for 15,000 balloons to be built, but in the end, 10,000 were actually constructed and 9,300 launched.

  The first of the newly designed balloons was launched on November 3, 1944. Two days later, on November 4, the first signs of debris were spotted floating about sixty miles off the coast of California. (No, my math isn’t wrong. Due to the lnternational Date Line, there was a two-day difference in time). This balloon didn’t cause concern because it was loaded with radio equipment and assumed to be a weather balloon that had gone astray.

  Over the next month, fragments of balloons started to show up in various locations and scientists were able to construct a rudimentary picture of what the weapon looked like. The U.S. government quickly determined that they posed little danger. They simply could not carry enough high explosive to cause any serious damage. The government was actually more concerned that these balloons could carry biological agents such as the plague or anthrax and infect major portions of the continent. Also, there was worry about the response of the American people once they learned about this weapon. The psychological panic could have been greater than any threat the bombs themselves could have ever caused.

  In late December 1944, the media reported on the finding of a balloon in Thermopolis, Wyoming. The U.S. government realized that it needed to keep a lid on this story and requested that newspaper editors and radio broadcasters stop reporting on the Japanese balloons. If word leaked out that the bombings had even the slightest amount of success, the Japanese would just send more. Surprisingly, the media cooperated and the Japanese never learned that a single balloon reached the continent until after the war ended (neither did American citizensthese balloons were responsible for an extremely large number of UFO sightings).

  Sand samples taken from the ballast of recovered balloons were handed over to the United States Geological Survey for examination. It had been assumed that the balloons were launched at sea, but several months later the USGS reported, based mainly on fossil evidence, that they had narrowed it down to two launch locations in Japan. Intensified bombing raids of Japan destroyed much of the country’s ability to produce and launch the balloons. Since the Japanese high command had concluded that the balloons were not reaching the United States, little effort was made to repair the facilities, and the program was shot down in April 1945.

  So, how much damage did these bombs cause?

  Actually, very little. The Japanese had the impression that the West Coast of the United States consisted of vast forests. They believed that if they could start forest fires, they could instill panic in the American people. But the Japanese made a major blunder; almost all of the balloons were sent during the winter and the rainy season when nothing would burn easily.

  Sadly, on May 5, 1945 (after the project was abandoned), six people were killed by one of the Fu-Go bombs. It appears that a preacher and his wife decided to take a group of children on a Sunday picnic on Gearhart Mountain near Bly, Oregon. While Reverend Archie Mitchell was parking the car, one of the children stumbled across a metallic object. When the kids tried to move it, there was an explosion. Elsie Mitchell and five children aged 11 to 13 were killed. These are the only known deaths on the mainland United States from enemy attack during World War 11. In 1950, a memorial was erected on the site. A bronze plaque states “Dedicated to those who died here May 5, 1945, by Japanese bomb explosion. The only place on the American continent where death resulted from enemy action during World War ll.”

  To add a strange twist to this story, another balloon managed to momentarily knock out power to the Hanford Engineering Works in eastern Washington state. This just happened to be an atomic energy plant that was producing uranium slugs for the atomic bomb that would later be dropped on Japan. Backup devices kicked in, but production at the plant was set back for three days and caused a slight delay to the Manhattan Project. Just think of the nuclear disaster that would have occurred if the cooling system had totally failed (remember Chernobyl?).

&nbs
p; It is estimated that approximately 1,000 Fu-Go balloons made it to the North American continent, while only 285 were actually discovered. The balloons were found as far north as Alaska and as far south as Mexico. While most of the balloon sightings were concentrated near the Pacific Coast, two balloons found their way to Michigan.

  Obviously, the Fu-Go program was not a great success. The efforts that the Japanese put into launching the balloon offense were much greater than the damage caused. Yet, if the balloons had been launched during one of those hot, dry California summers, they could have caused major damage. Even worse, the Japanese could have used them to deliver biological or chemical agents (they chose not to because they were afraid that the United States would retaliate in the same fashion).

  Maybe we should stop spending billions of dollars to create just one single fighter plane and look into some cheaper alternatives. Just think-we could replace our atomic weapons with billions of gas-filled balloons! They wouldn’t have to do very much just the sheer numbers of them could be a threat.

  Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

  bat bombs

  the other top-secret weapon

  You probably know that World War 11 came to an end shortly after the United States dropped its atomic weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Well,1 recently came across an alternative weapon that the United States was working on that had the potential to bring Japan to its knees without the great loss of human life that accompanied the nuclear weapons. What 1 am talking about here is bats. No, not baseball bats. Living, breathing, mammal bats.

  1 can’t even see you and 1 can tell that you are a bit puzzled by this…

  The use of bats to win the war was the brainchild of a Pennsylvania dental surgeon named Lytle S. Adams. You see, Doc Adams was a bit of an inventor in his spare time. His most successful creation had absolutely nothing to do with winning the war. In the 1930s, he came up with a rural air mail system that made it unnecessary for a plane to land to pick up the mail. With his partner Richard du Pont, Adams set up a company named Tri-State Aviation, which was the 1930s answer to Federal Express. Over the years, Tri-State Aviation went through numerous name changes and acquisitions and became a megacorporation that you may have heard of-US Airways.

  On that day that will supposedly live in infamy, December 7, 1941, Adams was driving home from a visit to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico when he learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Almost immediately, those neurons in Doc’s brain began firing (misfiring may be a better word). Doc thought about the millions of bats in the Carlsbad caves and concluded that they would be the ticket to win the war.

  As crazy as this whole scheme sounds, it all made perfect sense to Doc Adams. Basically, he proposed that small incendiary bombs be attached to a million or more bats, which would then be released from an airplane right before dawn. Prior to flight, the bats would be cooled down and forced into a semistate of hibernation. Then, when the bomber was over the target, the bats would be dropped. As they fell, the bats would warm up and fly off in all directions. Being creatures of the night, the bats would immediately disperse into all of the nooks and crannies of the highly combustible Japanese buildings. After about fifteen minutes, the time-delayed bombs would ignite hundreds of thousands of fires all around the city. No city in the world could be prepared for such a disaster, so any “batbombed” city would be engulfed in flames.

  Now, what would you do if you had a crazy scheme like this? Probably not much. But Adams had connections. Adams was also the owner of a then-cutting-edge air mail system and he just happened to take Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady of the United States, along on several trips. This placed Doc Adams just one set of ears away from the President. “This man is not a nut,” FDR wrote in a memo to his coordinator of information. He continued, “It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.” With FDR’s endorsement, if you could call it that, the bat bomb was placed in the hands of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) and the Army Air Force.

  There were several types of bats that were best suited for carrying bombs, but they were not available in the vast numbers needed to carry out the project. The bat of choice was the Mexican free-tailed bat, which was common to the caves of New Mexico and Texas. Preliminary tests showed that the most weight that these bats could carry was about ten grams. Further testing eventually proved that they could handle somewhere between fifteen and eighteen grams, which was still not much. This small payload capacity was a big problem in the days before miniaturization. The smallest incendiary bomb that the United States military had weighed in at a little over two pounds! Even a whole pile of bats couldn’t get that thing off the ground! There was also great concern over whether the bats could actually survive the extreme conditions that they would experience when the planes lifted them to high altitudes. Clearly, lots of testing would need to be done.

  Over the next year, Doc put together a team to work out all of the bugs. They made great progress, yet many of the officials in the military failed to grasp the whole concept and the project was nearly halted many times. Doc was forced to make repeated trips to Washington to keep the “Adams’ Plan” going. While on one of these trips, Doc learned that his plan was being confused with another top-secret project that was costing millions of dollars. When Doc returned from his meeting, he made one of the most memorable statements that 1 have ever heard. “Yeah! We got a sure thing like the bat bomb going, something that could really win the war, and they’re j**king off with tiny little atoms. It makes me want to cry.”

  Since the government was spending so much money on the atomic bomb project, it sent very little Doc Adams’ way. He funded a large portion of the project out of his own pocket. (This would later come back to haunt him when the IRS came after him for back taxes, and he had to sell his home to pay off the debt that the government never reimbursed him for.)

  Doc made a mock-up of the bat-carrying shell that he proposed for the project. It looked like a conventional aerial bomb, but its interior featured a stack of twenty-six round egg-tray like compartments designed to hold the bats. In total, each bat bomb could hold 1,040 bats along with the necessary environmental controls and a parachute. The actual sheet-metal casings were manufactured by the Crosby Company, which just happened to be owned by that famous crooner himself, Bing Crosby, and his not-so-famous brother Larry.

  The main chemist assigned to the Adams’ Plan, Louis Feiser, was in charge of producing a miniature bomb. He chose to use a new incendiary material that he dubbed “Napalm” (It’s certainly not unheard of today!) and encapsulated it in a flammable celluloid casing. The total package came in at 17.5 grams.

  Initial tests on May 3, 1943, at Muroc Lake in California (now used as a Space Shuttle landing strip) went very poorly because nearly all of the project components were not complete. A second round of tests followed on May 15, 1943, at a newly constructed field at the Carlsbad Air Force Base in New Mexico. With dummy bombs attached, the bats were dropped from airplanes, the chutes opened, and the bats sought shelter in every nook and cranny that they could find. If the bats were armed with real explosives, the scientists were certain that the buildings would have burned.

  A bat with a bomb attached. It’s hard to imagine how such a small animal could fly with such a large payload. (National Archives)

  Back on the ground, Feiser decided to take advantage of the fact that photographs of the testing were being taken. He took six cooled-down bats and attached the live incendiary to them. He intended for the semihibernating bats to stay put until the bombs went off and blew them to smithereens. (Clearly, animal rights were not of much concern at the time.) He misfigured.

  This is where the story gets really good.

  The hot desert sun brought the bats back to life and they flew off in all directions. Within minutes, the control tower burst into flames. The barracks erupted into an inferno. The fire then jumped from building to building, setting most of
the structures ablaze. The secrecy of the project meant that a crew of firemen could not be on the base while the tests were being performed. When the fire trucks finally did arrive, the guards would not let them out on the airfield. All they could do is watch from the distance as the complex burned to the ground and clouds of black smoke filled the air.

  This was certainly a big embarrassment for the members of the Adams’ Plan. Yet, it proved that the bat bomb could truly be effective. If six bats could burn down an air force base, just think what a million bats could do to a Japanese city that was largely made from combustible paper materials.

  Yet, the Army was not convinced. Support for the Adams’ Plan was pulled and the project looked as if it were dead in the water.

  Or was it?

  It turns out that luck was on the bat team’s side, at least for a little while longer. In a strange twist of fate, a Navy general named Louis DeHaven just happened to be watching the disaster that unfolded during the Carlsbad tests. Unlike the Army observers, DeHaven made a very favorable report to his superiors. This recommendation, coupled with a vigorous public relations campaign on Adams’ part, convinced the Navy that this was a project that had some potential. In October 1943, the Navy took control and renamed the Adams’ Plan. It was now to be known as Project X-Ray. Not only was Doc’s name missing from the project, he was missing also. The Navy canned him.

  New tests on the bat bomb took place on December 15, 1943, at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Simulated German and Japanese villages were constructed using native construction methods and furnishings. The bat bombs were tested in a series of controlled experiments (with two fire trucks standing by!). The NDRC reported to the Navy that “It is concluded that X-Ray is an effective plan.” It was shown that pound-for-pound, a planeload of bats was much more effective at starting fires than any weapon that the United States had in its arsenal at the time.

  Based on this success, the Navy ordered that large-scale production start by May 1944. The plan called for the building of up to 1 million bat bombs. Just when it looked as if Adams’ crazy dream was about to become a reality, the Navy pulled the plug on the project in March 1945. After some twenty-seven months and approximately $2 million in research, the bats were grounded. To this day, no one can say for sure why the bats never went off to fight the war.